I get starstruck so easily, an excited little man uses vi so show me his neatly organized and indecently well designed code and my heart is all aflutter.
Fifteen minutes previous this man was asking me how soon I could start, what they could do to hire me.
Twenty minutes previous he was offering me sole creative control of the security for their product. Authentication, certificate signing, certificate authorities, a crypto class to interact with their messaging classes...
One minute Ron is touting him as security genius, the next he's looking confused because I'm going too fast about skipping key allocation and just going with assigning trusted certificates.
They can afford to pay me nearly 15k less than any other company, than what I was making before. Still enough to maintain repairs on my car.
They don't have a package, or executive parking.
Their product is one of a kind, their marketing guy all excited about pitching it to people.
My geek slut qualities from two years ago are catching up to me, a consultant for them walked in, recognized me instantly and announced "Hey, where did you find the code warrior" and it took me a few minutes to realize that his was the guy who decided to show me just how much better at karate he was than I, since I'd already embarassed him when it came to TCP/IP.
My elbow aches looking at his lecherous grin, but I'm not sure that's the point.
It took half an hour from my arrival to learn of them, their history, the fact that there's six of them and that their parent company is a graphic design firm that does wedding movies.
It took fifteen minutes for them to beg me, ask me when I'd give them an answer, say "of course we'll work around your plans to go to Istanbul"..
It took two more hours for me to finish asking questions, looking through the code, arguing with two other programmers as to whether it was efficient to write an entire crypto class on the side.
I took notes, I plan to work on the problem some more before I decide if I want to spend sixteen hours a day trying to implement it.
We're talking: unpaid overtime, no package, no glorious job title, no guarantee of a job in six months, no getting up and leaving for Europe, probably a delay in the degree, too.
We're talking swallowing books by the lungful, doing things from scratch that no one's ever done before. Maybe even integrating smartcards.
We're talking a freebsd environment, with the occasional linux box.
We're talking about toys, servers, PDAs, SMS messaging.
We argued about whether or not I should dye my hair blue, rather than pink.
There were five people drooling today, rather than four like last time, but two of them were drooling at the UML diagrams, not my chest.
I will think about it tomorrow, I will think about it tomorrow.
Right now I wanna go horseback riding.
Maybe I'll ask them for extra vacation time instead of pay.
Right now i have a camping trip to organize for this weekend.
Right now I need a massage, my neck is cramping.
Right now I'm thinking about burning man, and that I'll be missing it again, four years in a row that there's been an excuse.
Right now... Old song, old tune, new set of exciting decisions.